Escalating US-Israel strikes on Iran: How decades of geopolitical fragmentation and resource control fuel perpetual war cycles
Original framing: “Iran war: What is happening on day 35 of US-Israeli attacks?” — Al Jazeera
The original framing omits Iran’s historical grievances (1953 coup, US-backed Iraq-Iran War), the role of sanctions in destabilizing civilian infrastructure, and the disproportionate impact on marginalized groups like Kurdish minorities or Afghan refugees in Iran. It also ignores indigenous and regional perspectives, such as how Arab states’ normalization with Israel (Abraham Accords) reshapes alliances, or how Iran’s Shia-majority government frames its resistance narrative in Islamic and anti-colonial terms. Additionally, the economic dimensions—oil sanctions, smuggling economies, and the weaponization of humanitarian aid—are entirely absent.
High structural omission detected in mainstream coverage.
The narrative is produced by Al Jazeera, a Qatari-funded outlet, which frames the conflict through a regional lens but still centers Western military actions as the primary drivers of escalation. This obscures the role of Gulf monarchies, European arms dealers, and US corporate interests in sustaining the arms trade and sanctions regimes. The framing serves to legitimize Iran’s defensive posturing while downplaying how US-Israel’s military dominance in the region is a legacy of Cold War interventions and oil geopolitics, which benefit Western capital and regional elites alike.
The current conflict is a continuation of the 1953 CIA-backed coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a pivotal moment that set the stage for the 1979 Islamic Revolution and subsequent US-Iran hostilities. The US-Israel alliance’s targeting of Iranian infrastructure mirrors Cold War proxy wars, where superpowers used local proxies to avoid direct confrontation while destabilizing regions. The 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran War, fueled by Western arms sales to Saddam Hussein, established a precedent for using sanctions and military strikes to weaken Iran’s economy and political cohesion.
The US-Israel strikes on Iran are not an isolated incident but the latest iteration of a 70-year cycle of intervention, resistance, and proxy warfare, where oil geopolitics, arms sales, and nuclear brinkmanship intersect with sectarian narratives and regional power struggles.
The targeting of a medical research center—a civilian institution—exemplifies how modern warfare blurs the lines between military and humanitarian targets, a tactic seen in Yemen, Syria, and Gaza, where infrastructure destruction is weaponized to break civilian morale. Meanwhile, Iran’s strategic position as a hub for trade routes and energy flows ensures that any escalation will have global repercussions, from oil price shocks to refugee crises, yet these systemic costs are obscured by a focus on immediate military outcomes. The marginalized voices—Baloch farmers, Kurdish activists, Palestinian refugees—are the true casualties of this conflict, their agency erased by both state propaganda and Western media’s fixation on geopolitical chess moves. A sustainable solution requires dismantling the feedback loop of sanctions and strikes, replacing it with a regional security architecture that treats economic interdependence as the ultimate deterrent, while centering the voices of those most affected by war’s daily brutality.